American Association of University Professors ❉ Washington State University

27 January 2012

Union! Union! Union!

The administration has let WSU professors down; time to organize

Published 1/20/2012 Daily Evergreen / Washington State University

By David Demers, associate professor of communication

Sometime
during the next couple of weeks the WSU chapter of the American
Association of University Professors will decide whether to begin the
process of forming
a collective bargaining unit for WSU professors. Here are five reasons
why faculty should unionize:

1.
The provost’s policy for evaluating and terminating tenured faculty
violates AAUP guidelines pertaining to academic freedom. The provost’s
office has forced
at least “five to 10” tenured faculty to resign or retire in recent
years because they received below satisfactory ratings in as few as
three annual reviews.

Vice
Provost Frances McSweeney revealed this practice under oath during a
deposition she gave in fall of 2010. I am the plaintiff in that lawsuit
(Demers v. Austin,
et al.), which is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth
Circuit. AAUP says annual reviews for tenured faculty should be used for
faculty development, not for termination decisions, mainly because
annual reviews can be easily manipulated to fire faculty
who are openly critical of administrators and their policies.

2.
President Elson S. Floyd’s administration did not provide faculty with
“ample voice” in the budget-cutting process, which also was biased.
These were some of
the key findings of an online survey of WSU faculty conducted last
year. WSU faculty have low job satisfaction and low morale. Although
budget cuts are partly responsible, the results of the study suggest
that the “termination policy” mentioned above may also
play a role. The survey found that even tenured WSU faculty (50 percent
of all faculty) believe they have little job security. In fact, WSU
scored lower on this measure than 80 percent of comparable universities
and organizations.

3.
Floyd and his administrators do not support free speech rights for
faculty in their service roles. They made that clear last year when they
convinced a federal
judge to toss out my free-speech lawsuit, arguing that faculty, as
employees, do not deserve First Amendment rights outside of the
classroom or their research programs. If the administration wins the
appeal, it means WSU can punish faculty who criticize administrators
and their policies. If faculty cannot criticize without fear of
reprisal, then shared governance is, for all intents and purposes,
meaningless.

The
irony is that WSU’s most famous graduate, broadcast legend Edward R.
Murrow, was a staunch supporter of free speech rights and the First
Amendment.

4.
Administrative salaries have increased five times faster than faculty
salaries. From 2001 to 2009, salaries of administrators working in the
provost’s office
jumped about 80 percent, according to state salary records. In
contrast, salaries for faculty during that eight-year period increased
about 15 percent, less than the rate of inflation. The average
administrator in the provost’s office now earns nearly $160,000
a year. The provost’s salary, $250,000, increased 66 percent. The
president’s salary, $625,000, also more than doubled. Administrators
also get to cash in some of their “banked” sick days when they leave the
university. Faculty on nine-month appointments do
not.

5.
There is no independent appeals procedure for faculty who believe they
have been unfairly treated at annual review time. Currently, they can
appeal only to deans
or the provost, who almost always side with unit supervisor. The
Faculty Status Committee can but usually refuses to hear annual review
appeals, because it is too busy with tenure-denial cases. But even if
the committee heard such appeals, it has no power
to force the administration to change a review rating. A union, on the
other hand, would have more power to force administrators to follow due
process procedures.

David Demers is an associate professor of communication at Washington State University.

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